The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to bit.listserv.ibm-main,alt.folklore.computers as well.
timothy.sipp...@us.ibm.com (Timothy Sipples) writes: > Agreed. There are a lot of similarities, but one difference is the ubiquity > of the Internet. It's really an accident of history (telco monopolies) that > the price-per-carried bit collapsed *after* the prices of CPU and storage > did. So we went through (suffered?) an intermediate phase when computing > architectures were principally constrained by high priced long distance > networking (the "PC revolution" and then "Client/Server"). It's interesting > viewing those phases through the rear view mirror. In many ways it's back > to the future now. re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#78 Entry point for a Mainframe? recent post/thread in tcp/ip n.g. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#73 NSF to Fund Future Internet Architecture (FIA) and similar comments in this (mainframe) post/thread http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#64 LPARs: More or Less? about telcos having very high fixed costs/expenses and significant increase in available bandwdith with all the dark fiber in the ground represented difficult chicken/egg obstacle (disruptive technology). The bandwidth hungry applications wouldn't appear w/o significant drop in use charges (but could still take a decade or more) ... and until the bandwidth hungry applications appeared, any significant drop in the useage charges would mean that they would operate deeply in the red during the transition. in the mid-80s, the hsdt project had a very interesting datapoint with communication group ... where we were deploying and supporting T1 and faster links. http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt The communication group then did a corporate study that claimed that there wouldn't be customer use of T1 until mid-90s (aka since they didn't have product that supported T1, the study supported customers not needing T1 for another decade). The problem was that 37x5 boxes didn't have T1 support ... and so what the communication group studied was "fat pipes" ... support for being able to operate multiple 56kbit links as single unit. For their T1 conclusions they plotted the number of "fat pipes" with 2, 3, 4, ..., etc 56kbit links. They found that number of "fat pipes" dropped off significantly at four or five 56kbit links and there were none above six. There is always the phrase about statistics lie ... well, what the communication group didn't appear to realize was that most telcos had tariff cross-over about five or six 56kbit links being about the same as a single T1 link. What they were seeing, was when customer requirement reached five 56kbit links ... the customers were moving to single T1 link supported by other vendors products (which was the reason for no "fat pipes" above six). The communication groups products were very oriented towards to the legacy dumb terminal paradigm ... and not the emerging peer-to-peer networking operation. In any case, a very quick, trivial survey by HSDT turned up 200 customers with T1 links (as counter to the communication group survey that customers wouldn't be using T1s until mid-90s ... because they couldn't find any "fat pipes" with more than six 56kbit links). this is analogous to communication group defining T1 as "very high speed" in the same period (in part because their products didn't support T1) ... mentioned in this post: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010e.html#11 Crazed idea: SDSF for z/Linux the various internal politics all contributed to not letting us bid on the NSFNET backbone RFP ... even when the director of NSF wrote a letter to corporation ... and there were observations that what we already had running was at least five years ahead of RFP bid responses (to build something new). misc. old NSFNET related email from the period http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet -- 42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
